Blood Red
by The Elusive Author
Summary: A story about blood and what happens when an old feud follows a survivor to Konohagakure. Original character included. Note: Currently, this story is on Hiatus.
1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note**: I revised this chapter extensively, therefore you have my apologies. Enjoy.

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"**They are all dead. **_It's actually quite a disappointment._"

"Is it now?"

"**Dropped like flies in a fire**."

"So you think."

The two men stood shrouded by smoke as the sun set, casting shadows in the wreckage and tinting the curling, smothering smoke the many tones and subtones of dawn. The place they stood at, once a thriving Village of trade, war, and class, was but a broken memory of its former self. Twisted, burned husks stood where there was once habitation. A crib with its mattress in tatters was most noticeable among the damage, but there was no babe to squall at the lonelieness and quiet that had descended upon the Village.

What fire had burned through remained only charred wood and singed stone. And then, there were the bodies.

They lay here or there, spread eagle or curled up like a fetus in a womb, until one followed the trail and found, in the exact center of the Village, the 'funeral pyre' the murderers used to condemn their victims to their deaths. There was evidence of struggling, this much the two men had noticed, but they felt... nothing. The suggestion was that the people had been burned alive under the noon sun, but why should they have felt anything for that kind of fate? The people were dead, now. Their screams and wails had long since faded into the air. The smell remained, but it wasn't enough to stir them.

"Actually, it is quite a disappointment." One said eventually. He had a voice like warm honey, sweet and soft and rife with the threat of wasps. "They had such promise and use."

"_Does this put a stop to the Plan?_" The other man said, his voice like the slithering of a sword out of its scabbard. "**I don't see how it can be completed if the main piece no longer lives.**" His voice was suddenly different, dropping lower into a menacing tone with the hiss of an adder behind it.

"Don't give up hope yet. If they had all died, there would be more bodies here. What it is that we need would not go down so easily." The first smiled with his words. "Search the ruins. If we are lucky, the host may be alive enough to drain."

* * *

The moon was at its zenith when the two-voiced man found something. The first man appeared as though from the air at his side in a heartbeat and they stared down at it. The claw marks in the boards of a house that had partially survived. Blood flecked the wood nearby, stating the presence of wounds. The second man inhaled deeply as though the scent of the blood was the most alluring fragrance in the world.

"**Delicioussss,**" he purred.

"Not yet, Zetsu," the first man said. He spoke with amusement. This was the proof he needed that a survivor of some use was to be found.

They followed the flecks of blood, finding that it was smeared more on walls than left as droplets on the ground. The first man seemed to be getting more and more excited the longer they followed the trail. It boded well, this absence of an overwhelming amount of blood. Perhaps they wouldn't need to drain the survivor at once after all. That would make things somewhat easier.

Without notice, the man suddenly stopped. Zetsu sniffed the air. The blood's scent was heavier here, in the jungle just outside of the Village. Perhaps the survivor had settled down for the night in the trees the Villagers had loved so much?

A blur darted out from the trees with little warning, small and quick and decidedly pale. The first man easily caught the arm that swung for him with clawed fingers. The small thing snarled, angry, and tried to kick the man, but he wouldn't allow it to do so. Intercepting the swing, he reached forward and grabbed the child by its throat, lifting it to eye level as it struggled and growled nonsense at him in defiance. Its show of wrath was weakening steadily though the longer the man held the child and he cocked his head at it. Dark irises set in his pale face began to burn with an ungodly red flame, the pupils slitting and dilating and forming strange designs as they spun, almost lazily.

The child needed only to gaze into those eyes for a few moments before it sagged against the hand that gripped its throat. Surprisingly gentle, the man lowered the body to the ground and let it be there. Zetsu, who had stood back and smiled the whole time, grinned wider. His teeth gleamed in the moonlight and the Man with the Eyes shared his smile, although it was subdued.

"Check the sex," he said, turning away to survey the child's little nest in the easily overlooked brambles. Scorched things, like a blanket and a doll, lay on a makeshift mattress of the wide leaves the jungle trees sported. There were little odds and ends the child seemed to have scavenged from the wreck of its hometown but they weren't of much importance. Forks, candelabra, a burnt scrollcase... such things could be replaced or forgotten with time.

He turned around to see what was taking his partner so long to identify the child and found the large, oddly shaped man crouched over the child, cradling it, and lapping at the blood.

"Stop that," the man shouted, approaching and shoving Zetsu away. For a moment, Zetsu's pale eyes gleamed with... the other man couldn't name the emotion to cause the glimmer. Hunger? "We need it alive."

"**I'd prefer to eat it now,**" Zetsu's dark voice said. "_It does taste so good,_" the light voice insisted as an afterthought.

The man rolled his eyes at the antics of the strange man and instead turned to examining the child. A brief inspection that he was sure most protective parents would find needlessly invasive and crude, evidenced the child was in fact a female.

"We have a problem," he said. "It's a female."

"_So we eat her?_"

The man glared at Zetsu who only grinned back.

**"If it's such a problem, remove the reproductive organs.** _We can dispose of those._"

"No. She will have to mature before I can safely have her sterilised. We take her with us."

"**Oh great, more babysitting.**"

"You can stay behind if that's your attitude. I am leaving, though."

And he slung the body over his shoulder and strode off into the jungle, leaving behind the moonlit expanse of what was once the Village Hidden in the Dawn.

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**Author's Second Note**: So, I don't know if I'm 100% in favour of this yet, so I'll see. Editing is a blast.


	2. Chapter 2

**Author's Note**: A new Chapter 2. Sorry.

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Orochimaru was hardly a pleasant man, put simply, and at his finest he was often a menace to his own people and a sociopath to those that thought less highly of him than even his Villagers did. It wasn't that difficult to think so low of him, though. He was a piece of work, truly, and one of the Hidden Leaf Village's _only _notable missing-nin.

When _the girl_ had been presented to him, he was hardly impressed by her despite the claims of her deliverer. She was small, not even yet past her first five years of life, and her feminity was something he never really liked in his subjects. When explained, he could admit the reasons for pushing her development onto him were sound enough, and amusing enough, to satisfy him. They were also true.

He would make sure she would remain safe, or at least whole, and in return, he would exercise his creative rights to stunt her emotional development as much as he could. Considering the development of most of his other experiments, he was assured of success.

His first step towards subjugating her included denying her a name. His people referred to her as whatever they wanted as a result, alienating her from their friendship. He was pleased with that, and since nobody would listen to her crying and complaining anymore she began to silence and rebel in her own secretive ways. Every time she was caught, she was punished by the one who caught her.

For years she grew under his watch, a source of his amusement as he whittled away his lifetime switching bodies and prolonging his existence and youth. He found she could be exploited to perform certain tasks if he only so much as hinted the task would displease him. He found that the funniest thing to drive out of her, for her resistance to him halting her resistance was a great thing both like a wall and yet weak. Weak like he expected a little female's defenses to be.

The torture was slow and harsh and eventually, she relented.

He rewarded her for small things she did for him. He had her taught and gave her the tools to make the best out of her speed and size. She never grew much, remaining a whole three heads shorter than him for most of the time he had her, but nobody ever expected a child to be able to remove their heads nonetheless, now did they?

He thought her owner would be pleased, even though he had her for only so long and had still enough time to make her even more depraved.

He gave her a name, finally, after she had forgot her old one with the passing of time. He named her grandly to reflect the goals those who were more important than her had placed in her future. _Kami Akatsuki_. Her owner would enjoy that.

She became his pet as the time went on after that. She would probably have curled up like a dog at the foot of his bed if he allowed her. When he touched her, she leaned into his hand. When he called her, she ran to him like he was offering her a way to save her life.

And then, he stopped with his little shows of affection, he quit his pretending and sent the child into her own mind for comfort as a last little _something_ to enforce her solitude.

Orochimaru was rather proud of himself by the time his medic took notice of the child that so desperately strove for his attention. What was known about the girl's blood to Orochimaru was soon shared with the young man who saw this only as a means to an end. She became _his_ little guinea pig then.

And he relished the opportunity to make her scream.

* * *

He worked in silence as deep as the world itself, patiently cutting away samples from a withered limb and placing pieces of skin, muscle, and vein on slides to look at much closer.

He hadn't addressed her since he had her join him on the table, and she fidgeted impatiently as she watched him work with his scalpel on the old forearm. She wrinkled her nose in disgust every time she caught herself staring at his long hands working at the tough flesh. Corpses never failed to make her want to vomit.

"It is quite rude to stare," Kabuto said to Kami. He didn't even have to look at her to know what she was doing. She flushed and turned her head away to examine a wall streaked with gore. Was it fresh? She couldn't smell the heady essence of iron, so no. Glancing at Kabuto's back, she wondered how long it had been since he had last cleaned his lab. The poor soul that must have died there in Kabuto's quest for understanding and violence went ignored. Death was a daily affair here, although it had never personally been threatened on her. She was intelligent enough to know there was a reason she was never threatened with death, but ignorant and innocent enough to be oblivious to it.

"Why am I here, Kabuto?" She asked the medic after a few more minutes of his tireless working. Did he expect her to just sit there and wait for him? She could be sparring with Kenji out there. That would have been something she would have preferred to waiting on the man.

He raised his head and looked at her. She averted her eyes from his and he smirked. Of the reasons she was forced to do that every time somebody strove for eye contact, he fancied it was because he had once put a scalpel to her eye and threatened to remove it if she ever looked directly into his again rather than assuming it was based on the '_instinct to avoid being trapped in an ocular genjutsu_', as Orochimaru had once explained. Instincts weren't genetic unless they benefited the species with them, and he saw no reason why the girl would have such an instinct if nobody in her little extinct species had ever carried an ocular genjutsu.

"I have some tests I need to perform on you to assess your level of physical development. While your actual age is unknown, by our examinations on the development of your body before I was able to estimate you as somewhere between eleven years old and twelve years old. Therefore, it is my belief you will have your first menses sometime this year or next. I want to assess _when_ that might be." Kabuto certainly did like to speak. Kami didn't understand much, particularly the words regarding science, but she nodded with wide eyes. He gave her a look that said how much he _really _doubted she understood him and even so, he did not simplify. She would figure out soon enough. "Strip down and sit on the bed," he stated, pointing to said bed. It was more of a gurney. She was well familiar with it and what she had to endure on its flat, itchy mattress before. She was intelligent enough to know not to push Kabuto into forcing her onto the bed. She had done once before and the fingerprints on her neck and arms had taken weeks to fade away as a result of how tightly he could grip her.

Her obedience came at a price, though, as it usually did. He was not Orochimaru, who rewarded her with sweet cruelties. His methods were darker, usually, and as she peeled off her clothes before climbing into the bed, she found out just what he would do to her.

He faced her, first, the scalpel in his hand stopping her heart with a mounting sense of fear. Her young, shapeless body had been marked by that same scalpel before. She was a cat who knew what the spray bottle meant and her body subconsciously tensed in preparation for the first incisions. He didn't cut her though but placed the scalpel aside so he could do his work on her instead.

He had her move certain parts of her body before he began to poke and prod her stomach and chest. She was a child and didn't understand the shame that she should have shown at the way he examined her, however she was uncomfortable enough to try and wriggle into a more comfortable position whenever he glanced away to record something. He had her hold still as he felt her chest, searching for something she didn't understand yet despite the frequency that she glimpsed older women when they had their nightly showers.

He searched her abdomen for signs of fertility that his delving chakra could detect. She squirmed at the feel of his chakra as it slid under her skin like the slithering of so many snakes. He had only to look at her and force eye contact with her for her to understand that _she was to remain still_.

He moved lower yet, finding the juncture of her legs and having her widen the parting of them so he could examine what lay within. The invasiveness of the procedure began to bother her thouroughly. His hands were cold, delving, ruthless. His chakra felt like ice inside of her as it prodded something so deep it felt unnatural and painful. Even if it wasn't a physical touch, it still hurt, and she couldn't help but kick at him, striking him in the face and knocking off his glasses. He glared at her and removed his hands, swinging at her and slapping her across the belly with enough force to have the sound of the impact ring through the laboratory and out into the corridors of the complex. She yelped and moved to rise, he followed and seized her arm to hold her still. She let him at that point, knowing that once he caught her it was only a matter of time before she pissed him off enough to have him intentionally hurt her.

"Never hit me again," he hissed into her ear. His fingers were vicelike on her thin upper arm, and moist. It rubbed off on her. "I swear, the next time it happens I will slice you open from the inside out and watch you bleed on the bed before I heal you and do it again. Do you understand me?"

He had to shake her before she nodded, her face turned away from him so he wouldn't see the actual fear in her eyes. To her, Orochimaru was the serpent but Kabuto was the venom. The price of pleasing her Lord Orochimaru was suffering under his pet medic, but it wasn't worth this _invasion_ that he had performed.

"I hope you found what you wanted," she said quietly. He released her and straightened. She didn't see his gloating smile as she ran off.

"Have a nice week," he muttered to himself.

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**Author's Second Note**: I decided to add a more in depth story about Kami's development. So, that's the reason for this and changing the whole tone of the story.


End file.
